Archive for Apps

Are You Thinking of the Children?

Alain Nteff was, and he was thinking about the mothers too when he created his lifesaving app Gifted Mom.

In 2012, at a twenty years of age, Alain Nteff visited a rural hospital to see his friend Conrad Tankou at a medical practice. At this hospital, Nteff was shocked to learn about the high number of deaths of both mothers and children during the process of birth. Many of these tragedies would be preventable with proper antenatal care. Both Nteff and Tankou set out to see how they could to minimize this affliction in their community.

“The problem of maternal and infant death is not a woman issue — it’s a humanitarian issue. Everybody should take seriously. We all have mothers, we all have sisters, and it’s not just a problem for women or girls.” – Alain Nteff

Nteff and Tankou’s part in solving this problem is an app called Gifted Mom. Gifted Mom offers the following services to women in Cameroon and Nigeria:

– Weekly Antenatal care guide and notifications for pregnant women.
– Vaccination guide and notifications for mothers with children under 5 years.
– Breastfeeding guide for mothers and Career Women.
– Pregnancy Calculator for calculating the expected date of delivery.
– Guide for first time pregnancy and teenage mothers
– Send your concerns to a Doctor and get instant reply.
– Journal your journey

This is a free app and the information it offers is crucial in minimizing unnecessary deaths of mothers and children. If moms have a question, all they have to do is text it to Gifted Mom and they will receive immediate, reliable information. This app also tracks vaccinations in an effort to minimize the 4,000 deaths babies suffer from vaccine-preventable diseases. So far 13,300 mothers and children have been registered through this app. That day trip to the hospital turned into a project that’s give life and hope to many.

It’s Really Quite Pinteresting

Co-founded in 2010, Pinterest is a relatively new company that revolutionized the discovery aspect of social media. With 176 million registered users, it’s clear that millennial founders Ben Silbermann, Evan Sharp, and Paul Sciarra (aka Cold Brew Labs) had a stellar idea in the concept of Pinterest.

Pinterest is a visually-driven website that allows users to collect and sort ideas, articles, pictures, and other inspirations. Every “pin” is a photo, and if you like what you see, you can double click to see the pin’s origin or click the repin button to save it to one of your boards. It’s like a virtual scrapbook or file folder- but beautifully designed and much simpler. Additionally, users can add their own content to the site to share their own ideas and work.

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This wildly successful site was the phoenix that rose out of the founder’s previous app failure, Tote. Part of the reason Tote failed was people hadn’t really begun shopping through apps yet; the main way people used the app was to send product images to themselves. They were image collecting. The recognition of this behavioral trend was the key for Cold Brew Labs’ next innovation. They took this new insight and transferred it over to the web to avoid one of the big potholes Tote had, and voila, Pinterest was born. Its monstrous success is a testament to what can happen when failure is looked at as a learning experience rather than defeat.

Although some have call Pinterest’s CEO somewhat “socially awkward,” it’s clear that his creation is a work of social genius.

[Read more about Pinterest’s origins on Business Insider!]

The Innovation Of Music Through Spotify

Spotify is a music listening app that has transformed the world.

Spotify was created by, 31 year old Daniel Ek, as an application to allow the user to listen to any music and create playlists without paying anything. The way Spotify makes money is through advertisements in between songs.

Originally, Spotify started out solely on computers. In 2013, things changed, Spotify launched an app to allow smart phone users to also stream music. In 2013, Spotify had 24 million active users that streamed over 4.5 billion hours of music. This completely transformed the consumers experience in the music downloading industry but has reduced the profits of artists around the world, because nobody has to buy the songs anymore.

I believe Spotify is in trouble the next several months because of the growing number of artists pulling their albums off of Spotify. For instance 2 weeks ago, Taylor Swift, pulled all of her songs from Spotify to increase her profits by having fans pay full price for the new album, 1989, which just came out. Swift made a smart move, but it could start a movement by artists around the world to remove their songs from Spotify and all other free music listening applications.

Daniel Ek, founded his first company when he was only 14 years old. He has the drive of an entrepreneur to do whatever it takes to succeed. He is currently worth $400 million dollars and is making a significant difference around the world through the evolution of streaming music.

In entrepreneurship, your age doesn’t matter, your drive for success is what will carry you farther than ever before.